


Pigeons

by EasyThereGenius



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (TV Movie), Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Gen, Guessing Games, Humor, Humour, Paris (City), Pigeons, Stupidity, product of boredom, statue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 12:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/849624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EasyThereGenius/pseuds/EasyThereGenius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor, finding procrastination becoming physically hazardous, takes some time off to think while in Paris. Or at least tries to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pigeons

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything in months and I've never posted anything here. First time for everything. In case anyone's wondering, yes, I recently spent a whole day loitering in the Tuileries with nothing better to do than write pointless angst/humour!fic about Time Lords. The sun was lovely though.

“Would you like to play a game?”

The Doctor looked up from his contemplation of the pigeons, mildly startled. It was noon in the Tuileries, and sunny: the dusty white gravel paths teemed with visitors under the bright warm sun of the first really nice day since they’d arrived in Paris. Spring had come late to Europe, and summer was likely to come even later if it came at all. The Doctor’s green velvet coat shone dully in the daylight with an iridescent sheen very similar to that on the wings of the starlings who were puttering about between the pigeons on the stretch of sward nearby. On his head, covering the spill of brown hair, was a battered woven surfer-dude hat he’d borrowed from Fitz. He was _relaxing_. He’d even eschewed one of the ubiquitous green metal chairs in favour of an old bench, the better to stretch out his long legs.

He looked up and gave the enquirer a brilliant, if somewhat empty, smile.

“I’m sorry. Really not in the mood.”

He’d been rather enjoying watching the pigeons, truth be told. Like most European cities, Paris was full of them: rats with wings, Anji called them, but the Doctor quite liked them.

(“Even the crusty ones with the greasy feathers and bald spots, and two toes missing on one foot?”

“Yes, Anji. Even those ones.”)

There was just something refreshingly human about them, when you came right down to it. They had an engaging if somewhat naïve curiosity about everything: scraps of rubbish held their attention for ages, even after the possibility of their being edible had been exhausted. They were persistent to the point of belligerence, and most of all they were constantly drawn to things that were bad for them - like discarded tourist _frites_.

“It’s a good game,” persisted the voice, with an encouraging bonhomie that the Doctor felt was quite unwarranted. He concentrated on watching a male pigeon who was apparently attempting to attract female pigeons while the females were apparently mostly running away. Another trait they shared with humans, it seemed. There was a general spirit of optimistic enthusiasm in the male pigeon that reminded the Doctor of Fitz heading up to the stage to sing “I put A Spell On You” in a karaoke bar.

Thinking of Fitz made him briefly wonder where the two of them had got to, and he hoped they were enjoying themselves: Fitz was probably lounging inappropriately on the corner of the Rue de Lafayette, hoping to convince some locals that he was one of them. Poor Fitz. Always hoping he’d be taken for something other than he was, something he perceived as more mysterious. The Doctor couldn’t blame him. He’d been like that too, once. When he was young. Now he spent all his time trying to pretend he was just like everyone else, and to his vague (but continued) incomprehension he was about as successful as Fitz.

 

He gave the intruder on his peace no more than a cursory upward glance and said: “You sound very sure of that.”

“Oh, I am.”

The Doctor shook his head, looking down now at his discarded shoes at the foot of the bench, leather baking in the beautiful sunlight, and smiled, very briefly, wiggling his bare toes.

He liked Paris. Every time he came here it was both remarkably different and reassuringly the same. There were so many landmarks he’d seen over his visits that remained fixed points in the flow of the city’s history. Blinovitch fixed points, even, the Doctor thought. Like the rings in a tree trunk, they showed both the age and the major traumas of a whole society clearly, if you knew what you were looking for.

The pigeons had ganged up on a rather scruffy raven who was attempting to commandeer the crust from the Doctor’s sandwich (thrown earlier by the Doctor to a sparrow, who despite all the best intentions of the donor, had never got it) so the Doctor tipped his hat down over his eyes and pretended he was alone.

Cities are in fact the best place in which to do this. Many people believe that the best place to be alone is the middle of the wilderness, but in fact here in the bustling, tourist-ridden heart of the Tuileries with parties of school children, the endlessly circling fitness fanatics and the somewhat surly-looking Parisian office staff taking a break in the sunshine, the Doctor felt properly and effectively isolated.

And he’d been happy with that. Until he’d been rudely interrupted.

“You know, I’m rather past the point of playing games,” he said, apparently to the air in front of him, “particularly chess. There was a time I enjoyed sitting in parks like this one and playing chess in the open air against old men who’d done nothing but play chess for twenty years. I felt I could really learn something, playing chess with those men.”

The raven flew away, the pigeons descending in a horde upon the crust.

“But I think what I really learnt was that little old men in parks don’t actually _like_ playing chess. It’s just something they do to avoid thinking about how they’ve wasted their lives.”

His unwelcome conversational partner was silent.

“So this game,” continued the Doctor, still not tipping up his hat. “Is it something that one actually enjoys or is it something one does to avoid thinking?”

He’d been trying to avoid thinking for far too long, now: and he was uncomfortably aware that he seemed to find getting into trouble a valuable procrastination tool. Which is all very well, except when you’ve been thrown into the umpteenth pit by the Inaugural Incarnation of the Blood Beast Goxethamoth and your companions are starting to develop laryngitis from constantly screaming “Doctor _rrrrr_ r!!”. When not thinking starts to get more physically dangerous than thinking, that’s when you need to have a sit down and reconsider your priorities.

So this was what he was supposed to be doing, here in the Tuileries, having done the high cultural equivalent of giving Fitz and Anji a fiver and sent them to the pictures (the Louvre). Relaxing, and thinking. The only problem was, even incognito in Paris and wearing someone else’s hat, he still had this uncanny ability to attract people who wanted to talk to him about their problems, their obsessions, their lives. It was a social disease, the Doctor thought, rather unhappily, except it seemed to work in exactly the opposite fashion to most social diseases by attracting people.

“Guess,” said the voice, helpfully. “It’s a guessing game, you see. Might as well start by guessing what the game is.” The Doctor gave in, and sat straighter with a sigh of resigned exasperation, tilting up the brim of his hat and squinting into the brilliant sunlight.

“You’re an Antarid. You can transmute your own form and anything you touch into anything else. You’ve been on Earth since 1983 when the Autons were using enslaved Antarids as cheap producers of synthetics. You fled to France when the Autons were wiped out in London and you’ve been here ever since disguised as a rather nice statue of -” and he paused, craning his neck to read the little plaque “ - ‘ _Cain coming from killing his brother Abel_ ‘. Very tasteful.” He paused, frowning. “What on earth did you do with the original statue?”

“It’s a duck,” came the answer, in a slightly embarrassed tone. “It lives in one of the ponds over there. Should be easy to spot if you want to, it’s the only one that sinks to the bottom when it tries to swim.”

The Doctor smiled.

“Okay, I’ve never been very good with transmuting the density of marble,” said the Antarid, defensively. “It’s the quartz. It ruins my rhythms.”

“As guessing games go,” said the Doctor, clasping his hands behind his head, “I can’t say it’s the most fun I’ve ever had.”

“Guessing what species I am wasn’t the game,” said the statue.

“Well, if it’s finding that duck, you’ve already ruined that one for me too,” said the Doctor, somewhat petulantly.

A tourist approached, crouched down right in front of the Doctor’s bench and pointed her camera up to take a photo of the statue. The Doctor stayed still and quiet, and the statue was as still as, well, the obvious. When the area was clear again, the Doctor said, thoughtfully: “You know, at that height, people aren’t exactly seeing you from your most, ah, impressive angle.”

“Look, do you want to play or not?” came the response, no longer in the most friendly of tones.

“Emphatically,” said the Doctor, “not. But I’ve learnt over the years that what I want rarely enters into it, so we may as well continue as if I’ve said yes. It saves time.”

The statue gave a chalky chuckle, and seemed to be smugly about to start on a version of Twenty Questions, when the Doctor cut in again:

“You want me to lead you to my time machine so you can go back in time and stop the Autons from enslaving your people. You initially ask me nicely, then when I protest, quite accurately, I might add, that it would be no good due to the proliferation of fixed temporal nodes, you have already planned to knock me on the head and torture me in the ornamental fishpond over there after the gardens close?”

“I -”

“You’re about to tell me Fitz and Anji are being held hostage at your command in the public conveniences nearest the Place de la Concorde (which are without doubt the most violently tasteless things in this city, by the way) under the guard of half a dozen Tuileries security men whom you have over the years convinced into believing you are a god by whispering to them when they’re half drunk and tidying chairs?”

“It’s a -”

“A nice, persuasive,  if slightly oily, man dressed completely in black asked you to make sure I can’t have a nice sit-down in the sunshine?”

“What -”

“As the last of your kind you’re hoping to enlist my sympathies and ask me politely to take you home, knowing that as a renegade Time Lord I can’t just blithely wander up to the interspatial Antarid consulate and hand you over as a war criminal?”

“No, it’s - “

“Then it really must,” said the Doctor, sounding weary, “be the Government. Interesting. You know, I can’t remember the last time I irritated the French authorities quite so severely.”

There was a brief, blessed moment of silence. A jogger ran past, shoes scrunching in the gravel. A party of tourists, following their leader like excitable, twittering chickens, the leader’s backpack sporting a nodding, grinning fabric flower like the proud crest of the cockerel.

“You think into things too much,” said the Antarid, eventually.

“I know,” said the Doctor. “I know.”

The silence stretched between them, but a little more companionably this time. The scent of cut grass and _patisserie_ drifted towards them on the air, and the Brownian motion that instinctively drives all pigeons made the whole flock on the lawn start to bob and putter in ever expanding circles towards the newly arrived _crepe_ van on the nearby plaza. The Doctor watched them gradually filter away from him, knowing that they were moving so gradually that they wouldn’t, no, _couldn’t_ know that they were actually moving at all. Following their instincts. Following a call they barely recognised because its origin was so base and animal.

Eat. Move. Live.

Survive.

Just like humans, really. From out of the distant crowds at the Louvre exit, he could see already the distinctive lounging gait of Fitz and the centred stride of Anji at his side. Heading toward him, following their own ever-expanding circle that thanks to him now stretched across the whole of space and time.

“Go on, then,” he said, out loud, before they could get too close. “One game.”

The sense of glee from above was palpable.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

The Doctor laughed aloud, half-turning.

“Without looking,” admonished the statue.

 


End file.
